FAITH

FAITH

One cannot talk about the wilderness without thinking about faith. The Children of Israel had a failure of faith. That failure caused them to stay in the wilderness for another forty years so that none of the original group was able to enter the Promised Land. What is the point of faith? With out suffering there would be no need for faith. If everything made sense we believe we would have no need for faith.

We often want to make sense of suffering. It is the existential “Why am I going through this?” We are deluded in thinking that to know why our suffering would in some manner ease. We look for meaning in the suffering of ourselves or loved ones. That is the “Why?” An accident that kills a family or a 9/11 which is a national tragedy demonstrates to us our mortality. When innocent person is killed or dies with a painful illness we want to make sense of that suffering. Suffering seems meaningless to us in that we want our lives to have value meaning and purpose. Therefore we seek to find meaning suffering and death as well as life. In grief then one most often ask God or the Preacher or their own heart “Why did this happen?”

All of our logical and rational thinking never quite satisfies to answer such existential questions. The crying out “Oh why?” is not a rational question but a heart felt pray like (and often really a prayer) utterance that calls for a different sort of answer. No set of facts, enough information, theoretical propositions, or degrees of knowledge, or great ideas can answer to the “why’ of pain and suffering. It is the Job moment of saying “I wish I had never been I born?” Job 3:1-3.

It is in faith that we find the answers to the really great “Whys” of life... Jesus said to the disciples in the fishing boat after he had stilled the storm. “Where is your faith?”

Hebrew 11:1 Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The Scripture tells the way to accept Jesus is through faith. That is because again the rational understanding as important as it is not able to understand what is beyond understanding. It is through faith that we accept and understand Jesus. It is through faith that we can find meaning in the incomprehensible such as suffering.